In the following essay, Kippen explores the implications of a moral reading of Gainess The Sky is Gray., Though Gainess works invite a wide number of readings, almost all current criticism can be divided into one of two broad categories: race-centered criticism, concerned primarily with the storys instructive value about such things as prejudice and injustice, and structural criticism, which describes the parts of the story and their relation to the whole in formal, rather than thematic, terms. Encyclopedia.com. Sometimes it just hurt, hurt, hurt. Me, I dont listen to my heart. With the exception of Auntie and Mr. Bayonne, who attempt to explain his mothers cold, dispassionate treatment of him on one occasion, James is alienated in his effort to come to grips with both the social and personal forces governing his life. It is important to recall that the Civil Rights era coincided with the casting off of imperial control by a series of African countries. The Harlem Renaissance was a period between World War I and the Great Depression when black artists and writers flourished in the United Stat, Sweat Though he can accurately recall the words of the student in the dentists office that lead up to the student being hit by the preacher, he cannot understand the argument in which they are engaged (She just looks at him like she dont know what hes talking bout. Just as the clouds clear after a storm, James finds out on his trip to Bayonne that the stormy clouds that are his life are parting to let some sunshine through. Contrary to what Octavia would have him believe, the choices that James must eventually make about the quality of his existence should not be between bum and man, or between adhering to the dictates of the head or heart as advocated by the student and the minister respectively. Not surprisingly, the lions share of critiques fall into the first camp, and even the structural readings include didactic (instructive) digressions in almost every case. In one instance Octavia enters a white-owned hardware store and pretends to inspect ax handles for purchase while James heats himself at the wood stove. With James and his mother departing for the day, the rest of the family is left alone without enough firewood, the breadwinners are not able to work, and money has to be used that could have been put towards food for the house. They are struggling for survival after James' father is taken in the army. "California Dreamin'" is a song written by John Phillips and Michelle Phillips and first recorded by Barry McGuire. The Sky is Gray is a heartbreaking story of James and his Mama. But if one decides to read the story as a more complex critique, not of racial relations, but of the valueand the costof dignity, one sees that even as an eight-year-old James understands her, Octavia is an interesting, fully-realized character. What this suggests is that in the highly polarized world in which James is growing up, external appearance can be more significant that internal realityafter all, whether Jamess collar is up or down, hes clearly not a bum, but a boy, and even a man can be permitted, under conditions as cold as those James and Octavia find themselves in, to pull his collar up around his throat. There he developed a keen interest in reading, and he wrote his first novel the next year; on news of its rejection, he destroyed the only manuscript copy he possessed. XIX, No. Short Stories for Students. of adulthood and of being a man in the course of the single day. The action in "The Sky is Gray" is broken up into thirteen short sections which describe a half day or so in the life of James, an eight-year-old black boy in the rural South of the late 1930s. Told in a series of thirteen more or less chronological episodes, Jamess narrative is punctuated by frequent flashbacks to past events, each of which provide the reader with a more complete picture of the moral forces pulling at and shaping James. However, his indirect discovery that the community is no longer capable of defining his individual responsibility to his family is potentially important both for him and for Sonny. Awesome read. The great fear here is not the capriciousness of white townfolk, but of being beholden, as a result of their poverty, to anyone. In 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated in New York and outbreaks of anti-black violence occurred in Selma, Alabama, including Ku Klux Klan shootings and Martin Luther King leading a procession of 4,000 in a protest march from Selma to Montgomery. As a result, she has made protecting James from becoming vulnerable her primary goal in life. I havent anything. Powerfully told with a convincing use of African-American dialect and dialogue, the story features nine-year-old James and the lessons he learns from his mother, Octavia, and others. Publication date 1979 Topics Feature films, Feature films, Short Stories., Blacks. Well, if I cant, to hell with it. His 1993 novel, A Lesson Before Dying, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. With Olivia Cole, James Bond III, Margaret Avery, Cleavon Little. The force implicit in the story is Octavias individualism, which threatens to deprive James of membership in the human community. Get help and learn more about the design. It suggests at first the bleak mood of the story but also hints at hope in the future. the-sky-is-gray-ernest-gaines-pdf 1/9 map index pdf The Sky Is Gray Ernest Gaines Pdf Thank you totally much for downloading the sky is gray ernest gaines pdf.Most likely you have knowledge that, people have see numerous times for their favorite books taking into consideration this the sky is gray ernest gaines pdf, but stop up in harmful . One means nothing more than the other. The fact that neither story offers a resolution to the underlying conflict apparent in the situations is indicative of the contemporary nature of the issue which Gaines raises. But Jamess narration creates a rationale for reading the story as a moral story. The story portraits three remarkable points: James's forced mature, his childhood memory damaged by poverty, but even so, their dignity still remains. As they ride in the back of the bus reserved for blacks and walk the streets of Bayonne, James, the first-person narrator, acutely evokes his almost unbearable feelings of pain, cold, and hunger: Only his love and respect for his mother prevent him from complaining. James instinctively knows that he would like to imitate the young man rather than the old preacher. Gaines's story "The Sky is Gray" similarly explores the differences between charity and justice within the segregated South. In short, what is. The purpose of the heart is to pump blood throughout the body, and nothing else.. Rather than reading a good book with a cup of coffee in the afternoon, instead they cope with some harmful bugs inside their computer. In her efforts to make James a man, Octavia apparently believes that she has only her own behavior and attitude toward life to offer as a model. Each of the first two stories in Ernest J. Gainess BloodlineA Long Day in November and The Sky Is Gray describes a black boy or youth attempting to come to terms not just with the world in which he lives, his parents problems, and the racism which circumscribes him but, more importantly, with the sensory orientation of his own body, the struggle between what William Faulkner called a black blood and white blood. It is this private or internal struggle more than any public or external debate that creates the real identity crisis for the young black and for the artist or writer who would contend with an America which has painted the senses white! Both Sonny in A Long Day in November and James in The Sky Is Gray have to resolve the conflict between their African/aural roots and their American/visual reorientationbetween James Baldwins declaration that it is only in his music . In The Sky is Gray, by Ernest J. Gaines and Mr. Parker, by Laurie Colwin, James and Janie are no exception. But assume for a moment that Octavias world is not so simple. Babb seems to approach this realization when she writes that Octavias dissembling enables her to warm him without compromising her dignity by begging. Babb realizes that Octavias act is fundamentally about dignity, not about warmth, but she doesnt think through the implications of the point she has made, here or later. As you may know, people have look numerous times for their favorite novels like this The Sky Is Gray , but end up in harmful downloads. I wouldn't turn down bright colors either. The title of the piece hints to the general dreariness which lingers throughout the story. The effect of the storys episodic discontinuity is to emphasize the particular moment James is living, whether he is reliving a memory or moving through present events, while de-emphasizing the storys overarching structure. Twenty-five for me to come back, twenty-five for him. BIBLIOGRAPHY ostreet9 Plus "Angel Levine" by Bernard Malamud. Understanding The Sky is Gray requires that one not only understand something about the Louisiana of the 1930s and 1940s but also understand what was happening with regard to race in the United States during the 1960s, because the events of what later came to be called the Civil Rights era made a substantial and lasting impression on Gaines, one that can be seen not too far beneath the surface of The Sky is Gray in the person of the student and in the storys preoccupation with racial inequality. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Dollar and a half to have it pulled. Robillard, the good dentist who takes care of the teeth of Bayonnes whites. The Winter Soldier peers through the scope and adjusts his grip, his finger ghosting over the trigger. As the day progresses, James shows us events from the past--from the time his mother whipped him because he could not kill . "The Sky is Gray" refers to the literal winter scene in which the story takes place. Other Sellers on Amazon. Indeed, the tooth with the aching root here is Jamess own Afro-American tongue and earthe dilemma of finding that his deepest roots are at odds with hypervisual America. Reading Gaines first, foremost, always, and only as a black author, an author of race and race issues, rather than primarily as an imaginative author, an author of ideas, delimits the kinds of questions one can ask about his works and necessarily diminishes the readers appreciation of the imaginative sphere in which he works. The Sky is Gray contains many of the themes and images Gaines returns to again and again in his work: themes of personal responsibility, grace under pressure, and moral behavior; images of strong mothers, mysteriously absent fathers, and families in which love is expressed more often in harsh words or silence than in overt praise or affection. 4, June, 1976, pp. With more than an hour to go before the doctors office will reopen and sleet starting to fall, Jamess mother decides to spend their bus money on something to eat and walk home. From a larger, more global viewpoint . Refer to each styles convention regarding the best way to format page numbers and retrieval dates. But if one takes a step back from the more obvious reading another, more subtle, reading begins to emerge. Written during the most turbulent years of the Civil Rights movement, the stories in Bloodline describe a less turbulent but perhaps even more racially raw period: Louisiana in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The problem in the story arises not so much from her efforts to make James a man as from her approach to and definition of manhood. In response, later that year, 200,000 Americans, black and white, joined together in a freedom march on Washington to demonstrate. The first strong character trait James possesses is that he . And a reading focussed exclusively on the storys racial dynamic misses this completely. The title of the story by Ernest Gaines is ironic. And since his stories are set in the past, his African-American characters appear subservient and are not placed in the revolutionary poses favored by some of Gainess contemporaries such as James Baldwin, Ishmael Reed, John O. Killins, John Wideman, or David Bradley., In sum, while Gaines may not have had the wide recognition of other African-American writers early in his career, there is a broad critical consensus that he is an important writer, a good writer, and a writer who has perhaps been undervalued and may continue to gain increasing recognition in the years to come, in part because he was somewhat overshadowed by his contemporaries during his early years, in part because of the increasing importance of studies of masculinity in the literary canon. Gravel crunches under the tires of the Rolls Royce as it trundles up the country road. Ivan Turgenevs The District Doctor. Gaines himself cites Ivan Turgenev as one of his more important literary sources, saying that he learned form from Turgenev. Although her primary goal is to project a model of strength for James through her own actions, her inability to make her sense of the world comprehensible to him leaves James vulnerable to the very forces from which she would shield him. Jamess mother Octavia is a strong, proud, uncompromising woman largely based on Gainess own mother. The dramatic conflict endemic to the stories in Bloodline arises out of the efforts of various characters to reconcile their individual needs with community prerequisites. His father is deployed to fight in World War II, so his mother; Octavia is forced to take . Action is the only thing. Plot Summary What is the allegorical meaning of the student turning the other cheek when the preacher hits him? 28 terms. 110-13. You a man. While this is the nature of Octavias world, it does not completely define the contours of the world with which James must come to terms. Characters He hears his mother complainWe the wrong colorand he sees for himself the relative comfort of the white people eating in a nearby cafe. Lowe, John., editor. It made me tear up mutiple times and shook me out of the comfort of privileges. The trip to town on the bus marked White and Colored represents the real rite de passage for the black youth in white Americathe blurring of his sensibilities into gray: The river is gray. Doing. The bus arrives and, while his mother pays, James moves to the back of the bus, where the blacks are made to sit. She uses her new awareness to structure her world into clear-cut oppositional units. Houston Community College English 1301 Professor Hinchen-Bryan "The Sky is Gray" Discussion Questions Directions: Type your answer to the following questions on this sheet in a different color and submit it canvas by Saturday, October 30, 2021 by 11:59 p.m. 1. . . However, the date of retrieval is often important. . In the gloomiest days, when the calendar suggests that winter is over, but the St. Petersburg weather is still unrelenting, the sky is gray, snow and wind are underfoot all over the world . Furthermore, the story implies that the community can continue to provide the individual with emotional support in his efforts to fulfill his individual needs. The limitations imposed on the narrative by an eight-year-old narrator are more obvious when he tries, unsuccessfully, to understand his mothers frequent mood changes or her mysterious decisions to fight or flee at each of the stations of mood the narrative visits. Pressure continues to mount on the government over a number of events that allegedly took place in Whitehall and Downing Street while COVID-19 restrictions were in force. Consider, for example, the contradiction in Babbs representation of Octavia as on the one hand trying to keep James from the cold while adher[ing] to strict rules of racial separation, but on the other being enabled by her dissembling to keep him warm without compromising her dignity. Exactly what is keeping James cold, one wondersstrict rules of racial separation, or Octavias uncompromised dignity? The Sky is Gray. On the other hand, James in The Sky Is Gray will never know the values of communal bonds if Octavia has her way. In the following essay, Meyer describes how The Sky is Gray is a coming of age story not just about coming to terms with growing up, but also dealing with the sensual orientation of ones body. . On the other, he is one of only two sympathetic white characters in Gainess story (Helena is the other). Not wanting to be a crybaby and knowing well that his mother cannot afford a trip to the dentist, James recalls his efforts to disguise his pain from the rest of his family. Mother and sons odyssey through the dangers and pitfalls of poverty and racism also includes encounters with two kinds of whites: the dentists receptionist, who delays their appointment and then locks them out in the cold, and a woman and her invalid husband, who invite them into their store, offer them a hot meal (in exchange for work, at Octavias proud insistence), and phone the dentist to make sure he takes care of Jamess toothache. At the end of the story, although the sky is still gray, readers sense hope for James with the lessons he has learned from good people, black and white, but from no one more than his strong and principled mother. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. 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